Eufloria HD Review (PS Vita)

Sowing the seeds of war.

Greg Turner, 2 years ago, 9 comments.

Eufloria HD on Vita is an enhanced port of a 2011 PS3 game, adding touch control for the handheld version. It is essentially a real-time strategy game, which means you’ll be commanding your troops in action constantly as opposed to turn-based games such X-COM: Enemy Unknown.

Your soldiers in Eufloria are seedlings, with you having to take control of other asteroids and gain more ground. Fortunately, you have a number of approaches at your disposal.

The game will usually start with you on one asteroid and you’ll be tasked with taking control of all the other asteroids in the level. Occasionally you might be given different objectives – such as ‘defeat all enemies’ or ‘be the first to get 200 seedlings’ – but for the most part this is a command and conquer game. You move your seedlings by tapping an asteroid and then tapping the place you want them to go to, then you can decide how many seedlings you want to move.

To take over an asteroid you’ll need at least 10 seedlings so that you can plant a tree, which will then grow more seedlings. As well as trees that grow your seedlings you can plant defensive trees that don’t grow them but will attack any enemies that come to the asteroid.

As well as regular seedlings you can get more varied troops depending on how you choose to spend your flower ‘laser pods’. These can be used to create more powerful, glowing, seedlings or a ‘lasermine’ that circles your asteroid and kills any enemies that try to invade. You can also assign seedlings into boosting that asteroid’s strength, speed or energy stats – meaning that future seedlings from there will be better. Of course as levels progress you can find yourself having to manage 10 or 20 asteroids, fending off enemy attacks and trying to take over more territories!

This may sound quite complex when you have to explain it in writing, but the game does a great job of easing you in and, as someone that doesn’t play a lot of strategy games, I found Eufloria easy to play yet testing at times. There are 25 levels in the story mode and I didn’t really struggle until the last few levels – the last level in particular is extremely challenging.

The story is just as minimal as the rest of the game, but it’s nice to have a little bit of narrative to accompany things. The campaign will last you a good 20 hours or so, perhaps less for those more skilled or experienced in this genre. And even beyond that there is a skirmish mode that allows you to take on a more battle focused experience, so there’s a lot of content here.

What’s Good:

A good learning curve for players new to the genre.

Very clean, minimal look.

Nice, chilled soundtrack.

What’s Bad:

Story lacks depth.

Might not be enough tempt experienced genre players.

Sometimes touch controls are inaccurate

I enjoyed my time with Eufloria HD which surprised me a little, as this isn’t a genre I’ve traditionally played. I think the touch controls make the game more accessible, which will help beginners and this is a solid RTS title that is worth checking out if you’re interested in the genre but haven’t taken the plunge yet.

Score: 7/10

Not usually for me, I found this strangely relaxing too. Good shout to the soundtrack (ambient as it is) as well as the lovely sound effects which sounds like distant radio chatter (amateur radio, etc). Hypnotic, almost.

I’ve only played the demo on PS3, not usually my genre but this was a bit different. My only criticism is that as lovely as it looks when zoomed in, i found i was zoomed out most of the time in order to play it.

i might have been tempted, but Amazon gave the game away for android the other day, so i can play it on my Kindle.

and it is an amazing game.

one thing i love is how deceptive it is.
it seems like such a calming, serene game, but what’s really happening is you’re conducting an all out war for survival.
when you’re zoomed out all you see is plants floating around, zoom in though and you see the fighting, the seeds attacking each other in numerous dogfights, bombing runs on the trees, and death in huge numbers.

really, it’s actually rather violent, but it never actually seems that way.
even close up it still almost seems graceful.

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